Page:The Newspaper and the Historian.djvu/119



The newspaper, like the individual, has its own sense of humor that changes from generation to generation and that undergoes a sea change in passing from one country to another. The early type

was largely that of the joke,and Charles Lamb,writing in 1831 of “ Newspapers Thirty - Five Years ago,” says that “ In those days

every Morning Paper, as an essential retainer to its establishment, kept an author, who was bound to furnish daily a quantum of

witty paragraphs. Sixpence a joke- -and it was thought pretty high too — was Dan Stuart 's settled remuneration in these cases. The chat of the day, scandal, but, above all, dress, furnished the material. The length of no paragraph was to exceed seven lines.

Shorter they might be, but they must be poignant.”

Of his own efforts at sixpenny joke-making, he writes ruefully : “ No Egyptian taskmaster ever devised a slavery like to that, our slavery. . . . Half a dozen jests in a day (bating Sundays

too), why, it seems nothing! Wemake twice the number every day of our lives as a matter of course, and claim no Sabbatical exemptions. But then they come into our head. But when the head has to go out to them - when the mountain must go to Mahomet Reader, try it for once, only for one short twelve-month .” 41

“ But the fashion of jokes, with all other things , passes away,” and the joke was in large part superseded by the professional humorist who through literary form or through cartoon has lent

his own individuality to that of the newspaper. Artemus Ward

and Bill Nye, Josh Billings and Doesticks, Nasby, Alden , Mr. Dooley, Mark Twain and Lowell, Nast, and the galaxy of Punch

humorists have all been teachers and with more or less seriousness

of purpose have attempted through humor of pen or pencil to convey truths unacceptable in other form. The individual humorist has been followed by the “ colyumist ” who, with many of his contemporary cartoonists , becomes not a

teacher but an entertainer.42 The jokemaker, the humorouswriter 41Works, Edited by W. Macdonald, II, 136– 147. 42 Different origins of the humorous column have been noted. Julian Street thinks it probably began in 1885 in the Chicago Tribune where H. T. E. White called a column “ Lakeside Musings.” Five years later this column was taken over by Eugene Field. - Abroad at Home, pp. 156 – 163.

The fullest discussions of the humorous column noted are those